Kulaks

The kulaks were a class of the Russian Empire which was formed by the 1906 Stolypin reform. By 1918, the term "kulak" meant every peasant who had refused to give a percentage of their grain to the Soviet government in Moscow, and Vladimir Lenin called them bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people, and profiteers who fattened on famine. Kulaks were declared class enemies of the poorer peasants under the Soviet Union, and Joseph Stalin persecuted peasants with a few cows and five to six acres more than their neighbors as "kulaks" during his "Dekulakization" campaign of 1929-1932. 1,800,000 kulaks were deported, and 5,000,000 kulaks were either killed by the NKVD or died as a result of the confiscation of their land for collectivization.